After Her (3 page)

I had read a book once about a boy who got lost in the forest, and some wolves found him and took care of him. (It would be a boy, of course, who got to have an adventure like that.) Still, I loved that story. I saw us running free over the hillside, unencumbered by parental rules or concern for danger. We were a couple of wolf girls—but with fashionable jeans, though really what we wore were just Levi's.

W
E RODE OUR BIKES A
lot. No destination in mind. But you never knew what you might find. Once, riding around, we'd passed a Dumpster with a bunch of records stacked up next to it—someone's entire record collection from the looks of it, and not things like Mitch Miller or Mantovani either, or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which was the kind of music our neighbor Helen favored, or Jennifer Pollack's favorite, which we could hear out the Pollacks' window all day long, the Carpenters.

For some unfathomable reason (though, as a girl who liked to make up stories, I invented a few scenarios concerning what had brought this about) someone out there had chosen to throw out his or her entire album collection. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, of course. Also Black Sabbath and the Moody Blues, Procol Harum and Led Zeppelin, along with folkier types of music too—Cat Stevens and Linda Ronstadt, Leonard Cohen, Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Simon and Garfunkel. There was one unlikely component in the mix that Patty in particular loved: an album by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner called
Burning the Midnight Oil.
It had two side-by-side images on the cover: one of Dolly, sitting by a fireplace, bursting out of an amazing red gown, with a heartbroken look on her face; the other of Porter, in a rhinestone shirt, raking his fingers through his yellow hair, looking equally devastated. My sister loved Led Zeppelin and Cream, but after finding that album, Dolly Parton became Patty's favorite singer of all time.

There were way too many records to fit in our bike baskets. We hid part of the stash, in case someone else came along and took them before we could get back for the next load. It took us three trips getting the whole collection home, and for the rest of that summer, our main activity was playing music on my tinny little monaural record player from when I was little, decorated with old Disney characters.

We memorized the whole of
Alice's Restaurant
and sang “City of New Orleans” and “American Pie” now as we rode our bikes.
“This'll be the day that I die, this'll be the day that I die.”

We loved how Leonard Cohen sang “Suzanne,” and though the words made no sense, we could tell it was a sexy song. We loved Donovan. We actually wore out the Crosby, Stills and Nash album with “Suite for Judy Blue Eyes.” We turned the volume up to the loudest it could go for “Whole Lotta Love,” but we liked more gentle music too. We knew Jim Croce had died young, tragically, which seemed to make it even sadder listening to the song about trying to call up his old girlfriend but he can't read her telephone number on the matchbook where he wrote it down. If there was one thing we loved about a piece of music, it was the presence of heartbreak, or better yet, tragedy.

“Every time I hear that song, I keep hoping he'll finally figure out the number and get another dime,” said Patty. “You know if he did, they'd be together.”

One time, after we first brought home those records, I had asked our mother what kind of music she'd loved when she was young, and for a second, a look came over her I'd never seen before. “There was never anyone to equal Elvis,” she said. “But I'm over him.”

It wasn't only Elvis she'd gotten over, but every man. After our father left, it was as if she'd drawn the curtains, and all she wanted was to be left alone, with as little opportunity for loss or sorrow as possible.

W
E WERE WANDERING ON THE
mountain one time—a little higher up, farther from home than usual—when we saw an amazing sight: a man and a woman running through the grass, totally naked.

We hung back, not wanting to embarrass them, but the woman waved in our direction. The two of them walked over to us, laughing—still without their clothes on, but acting as if there was nothing unusual about this. We tried hard not to look down, at the man in particular. Though neither of these people seemed even close to shy.

“Beautiful day,” the woman said. “Can you believe these wildflowers?”

It was the season for California poppies. They were everywhere, like something you'd see on a postcard, though if this was a postcard, the naked people wouldn't have been part of it.

They held hands and walked off. Patty and I didn't say anything, even to each other. We knew each other so well that even when something amazing happened, there was no need to speak. We just burst out laughing and held hands, running back down the hillside so fast we almost fell over ourselves.

One time we met a man playing a guitar and singing, with a long-haired woman with a baby on the grass beside him.

“I think that was Jerry Garcia,” I told my sister. I had to tell her who that was, before she got impressed, and even then, not all that much.

We were in the middle of some game one time—Charlie's Angels, maybe, or just drifting along, as we often did, snapping the heads of timothy grass while reciting “Momma had a baby and her head popped off”—when we came upon The Thing. Patty spotted it first: the weird, hairless body of a small unborn animal—a deer fetus probably, still in the sac, with its spindle legs folded into itself and shut eyes with their translucent lids that were never going to open, ears flat against the skull, a map of blue veins threading just beneath the skin. Somewhere not far from this spot, we imagined a deer mother wandering, bloody and dazed. Within hours, you knew, the vultures or coyotes would have found the body of the doe. Tomorrow it would be gone without a trace.

Sometimes we pretended we were a couple of Indian maidens, the lone survivors of a slaughtered tribe, who roamed the foothills of some vast mountain range by day, trapping our food and hunting game, returning to our teepee only at night to eat our cornmeal mush and gnaw on a little pemmican, wrap our threadbare blankets around our rawhide shifts before another sunrise sent us back out onto the range. I wanted to light a campfire and throw popcorn kernels in to watch them pop, but Patty wouldn't go along with it. Fire made my sister nervous. The only thing that did.

There were a couple of horses on the hillside. They must have belonged to someone, but they just grazed there, so we could pretend they were ours. Sometimes we brought them carrots, if we had enough at home. We gave them names—Crystal and Pamela, because those were the names we wished we were called. They seemed to know us after a while, letting us come up alongside them, stroking their backs. With Crystal, especially, you could almost imagine riding her bareback, if there had been a way to get up on her, which there was not.

We played we were blind people, with our eyes shut, turning in circles five times, then walking fifty steps to see where we'd end up. We'd open to a random page of
My Secret Garden
(a book I'd seen in the bedroom at the house of our neighbors, the Pollacks, one night when I was babysitting, full of wild stories women had made up about sex, that I'd snuck home in my book bag) and read it out loud to each other. We pretended we were boys and peed standing up.

For us, back then, it was exciting enough, just speaking certain words out loud. Each of us assembled a pile of pulled-up grass or dandelions in front of ourselves and when it was our turn, we'd have to think up some forbidden word—tossing some of our grass in the air as we uttered it, though for us the list was frustratingly short because our vocabulary concerning the language of sex was limited:
Intercourse
, naturally
. Butt. Nipple. Vagina. Penis.
And the one that had become, for me that year, the scariest.
Period.

Twice, in our rambles on the mountain, we came upon a couple making love in the grass—though on neither occasion did they see us. From years of playing detective, we'd gotten good at being stealthy, though later—safely home—we couldn't stop laughing.

You might have thought some of our experiences would have discouraged further exploration, but it was just the opposite. The mountain opened up for us the picture of a bigger world than what we ever could have known in the safe confines of our tiny house and yard, and the fact that this other world had dead animals in it, and naked people, and predators, just made us want to discover more.

The days stretched out, one after another, vast and unbroken as the grassy landscape of that hillside and the darkening sky overhead. Other kids had to go inside at dinnertime. We'd hear their mothers calling to them, though often they knew, without being called, when it was time to head in. For us, there was never anyone calling, and no worry or guilt that our mother had worked all afternoon to make a steaming family dinner now left to cool on the table. Dinner was whatever cold cuts we located in the refrigerator, whenever we got home to eat them.

Going back outside after we ate, we might stay out until ten o'clock, just making up stories or prowling behind the houses, looking in windows to see if anything interesting was happening, which it never was. When we let ourselves back in, we'd hear our mother's radio in her bedroom and smell her cigarette smoke, call out “Good night, Mom,” and head into our own room, where we'd set a stack of records on the record player. We'd lie on our beds and read out loud to each other—from a joke book, possibly, or one of the biographies I got from Scholastic Book Club, or another one of the wild stories from
My Secret Garden
(though these mostly baffled my sister)—and whisper to each other until one of us fell asleep. Usually Patty.

With the window open, you could hear the sound of crickets, or an owl, or a coyote howling, and on rare occasions, a mountain lion. You could look out to the mountain and see stars, and when the light came in the morning, there were the horses grazing—horses mating even—and hawks circling overhead.

It was the place we found out about everything, that mountain. Animal bones and deer scat. Birds, flowers, condoms. The bodies of dead animals, the bodies of men. Rocks and lizards. Sex and death.

 

Chapter Four

S
ome years before—when I was around ten, Patty eight—an old woman who lived in a house on the cul-de-sac at the far end of our street died following a long illness, and her husband moved to a nursing home. Their house sat vacant for close to a year while their children worked out what to do about the place. Then sometime in the spring the house had been sold. All we knew about the new residents was the name on the mailbox, Armitage.

They had no children. Over the months we'd become vaguely aware of Mr. Armitage—a man of stocky build and thinning hair, who evidently worked (this much we learned from Mrs. Gunnerson) as a teacher at a ballroom dancing studio in San Rafael. We saw him walking to the bus stop a few blocks away most afternoons and returning home around nine o'clock at night. Later, when hardly anyone was out but us, he'd walk their small dog.

On rare occasions—only at night, if we were out later than normal—we'd see the woman we determined to be Mrs. Armitage carrying a large pocketbook and wearing some unbecoming dress over her shapeless body, and (a little strangely) a hat, regardless of the weather. She always wore high heels, as if she was headed someplace special, though from the looks of things, her walks around the neighborhood with their little dog—a mutt who seemed to have some Jack Russell terrier in him—took her to no particular destination. Other than those times—no more than three of them—we never saw her, and because the hat featured an odd little veil in the front, we never got to see her very closely either.

Somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Armitage appeared to be an outdoorsman. Sitting on our back steps, eating our Pop-Tarts or granola bars, Patty and I often observed him heading up the mountain, carrying a walking stick, with his little dog trotting alongside and a pair of binoculars around his neck. Mrs. Armitage was never part of these expeditions, we noted.

“Maybe he's meeting a girlfriend up there,” I said. “Maybe he's a spy.”

“He doesn't look like the type,” Patty offered. As much as I would have liked to think otherwise, I had to agree, this was so. And anyway, Mr. Armitage's hikes seldom lasted more than half an hour: a quick jaunt up the trail, then down again. My sister and I decided this was probably his fitness routine, though if so, it did not appear to be having much effect, so far. Like his wife, Mr. Armitage remained on the chubby side.

One noteworthy fact about our new neighbors had to do with their landscaping efforts. Early on in their time on Morning Glory Court, Mr. Armitage had hired a man with a small tractorlike machine to come in and tear up the lawn, and we briefly imagined that the Armitages might be doing something exciting like putting in a pool or constructing an elaborate garden at least. But when the job was finished, it turned out all the Armitages had elected to do was rip out the grass of the lawn and replace it with concrete blocks. Karl Pollack, who'd spoken to Mr. Armitage around this time, as none of the rest of us on the street seemed to have done, reported that our neighbor had done this as a way of avoiding the inconvenience of yard maintenance and reducing his water bill.

The other big disappointment where the Armitages were concerned had to do with their television set. At this point, our neighbor Helen's husband, Tubby, was still alive, and he had taken to watching the shopping channel during the very time slot when we liked to catch our episodes of
The
Brady Bunch
through their window. Viewing our show through the Pollacks' window had also become an iffy proposition. (Their newborn son evidently suffered from colic, and they had recently acquired a VCR—a new invention—on which they tended, maddeningly, to play episodes of Mr. Rogers they'd taped for the purpose of getting Karl Jr. to sleep.) This had left Patty and me searching for a new viewing location for Drive-In Movie. Briefly, we'd thought of the Armitages.

But unlike every other house on our side of the street that backed up against the mountain—whose TV sets we could see, glowing blue through their picture windows—it appeared the Armitages didn't own a TV. Not one they kept in the living room anyway—the spot necessary for us to look in through the picture windows at night to catch our shows. This left us wondering how they spent their time.

There was the dog, of course. Maybe they liked doing jigsaw puzzles, Patty suggested. Or Scrabble.

But suppose the Armitages were living a secret life, as international jewel thieves, or spies? Maybe Mr. Armitage was one of those people who provide information about the mob to the FBI, and he and his wife had to go into hiding with a whole new identity. Maybe Mrs. Armitage had suffered a terrible accident that left her face horribly scarred, which accounted for her staying inside all the time, except for those rare walks in the night. As the Charlie's Angels of Morning Glory Court, we would get to the bottom of their story.

We started a scrapbook, devoted to Mr. Armitage. More accurately, I started the scrapbook. Patty just went along with it, as she did with most things I suggested.

Years before, our mother had begun a scrapbook documenting my babyhood, but she'd stopped keeping it up after a couple of months, which had left many blank pages. I saw no harm in ripping out the pictures devoted to me: my newborn footprint, a photograph showing our mother, with an expression I barely recognized, of eagerness and hope, and our young and lanky father—skinnier than we'd ever known him, with a cowlick—wrapping his arms around the two of us in a gesture that would have made you think no harm could ever befall this family. The entries—daily at first—had slacked off dramatically around the point of my six-month birthday. Mention was made of my first tooth, and a time when—hearing Andy Williams singing “Moon River” on the radio—I'd reputedly run to get our copy of
Goodnight Moon
and started dancing. My mother had stopped writing in the book not long after this.

I made a new title page now: “The Mysterious Life of Albert Armitage,” and wrote the date, along with our stated mission—to learn everything we could about our inscrutable neighbor (
inscrutable:
a word from my fifth-grade extra-credit vocab list), though what the purpose might be for our project we never said.

For Christmas that year, our father had given me a Polaroid camera and five rolls of film that I'd been saving ever since. I decided to dedicate these to the project of documenting the life and habits of Albert Armitage.

We wanted to include Mrs. Armitage in our project too, but sightings of her were so rare, we would have nothing to put in our scrapbook if we relied on documenting her brief forays into the neighborhood. The hope was that once we understood more of the husband's story, we'd get an idea of what was going on with his wife.

We began our scrapbook with the more mundane aspects of our neighbor's existence: Mr. Armitage carrying out his daily routines of heading up the mountain for his morning hike with his dog, walking to the bus stop, and picking up the Sunday paper on the curb. With no lawn to mow, he spent little time on yard work, though we had spotted him once or twice standing on the edge of his cement-covered plot of ground, pulling up the occasional dandelion that made its way through the cracks. Another time we saw him lining up the rocks that edged the cement blocks. Patty and I exchanged a meaningful look when we saw him doing this—both of us concluding that it would be a poor idea to try stealing rocks from this house anytime in the future. He kept close tabs, evidently.

Recognizing what Mr. Armitage's attitude was likely to be concerning the idea of our taking pictures of him, we had cooked up a method for concealing our actions. This called for Patty to stand in front of whatever location it was where we spotted our subject, but slightly off to one side or the other. She'd strike an elaborate pose (hand on hip, waving to the camera) while I aimed the camera in such a way as to capture an image not of my sister at all, but of Mr. Armitage and, on occasion, the dog. To complete the ruse, I'd announce in a loud voice, “Great shot, Patty,” or “You really looked cute in that one.”

On our way up the street toward home we'd peel back the paper on our latest Polaroid and watch the image develop before our eyes: Mr. Armitage checking his watch. Mr. Armitage hosing down his rocks. Mr. Armitage getting his mail. The most exciting page of our scrapbook featured photographs we'd taken (while pretending to be fixing my bicycle chain) of Mr. Armitage giving his dog a bath.

Patty participated in our investigation, but unenthusiastically. From the first time we encountered Mr. Armitage, my sister maintained a protective attitude where he was concerned. He was a dog lover. That's all she cared about.

“He's just a person,” she said. “He isn't hurting anybody. I bet he's just sad because of his wife's accident.”

My sister was referring here to an idea I'd proposed as an explanation for why we only laid eyes on Mrs. Armitage at night, and hardly ever, even then. “Someone threw acid on her face,” I had suggested. “She used to be incredibly beautiful, but now she doesn't want anyone to see her.” Of all the scenarios I'd suggested to explain the Armitages' odd behavior, my sister chose to subscribe to the theory that Mrs. Armitage was a tragically disfigured burn victim, and she felt sorry for them.

But for me, there remained something troubling about the activities of the couple at the end of the street. Keeping our scrapbook was, for me, a way of addressing, in a tangible way, an intangible feeling of uneasiness about our neighbors.

Or maybe it was this: so many questions remained unanswered in our lives at the time. We were looking for hard data to explain the inexplicable. Maybe I hoped that if we assembled enough simple data concerning an individual whose behavior confused us—investigating the contents of his trash can, tracking the times of his departure for work and subsequent arrival home, and whatever else we might record through the viewfinder of my camera—we might come to understand the things that struck us as odd. We were too young then to recognize that the discovery of hard facts seldom yields true enlightenment.

After a few weeks of working on our scrapbook—and finding no additional data of significance—our interest in documenting the comings and goings of Mr. Armitage tapered off, to the point where one day, finding the scrapbook, I realized that nearly a whole year had gone by since we'd made any entries.

I put the scrapbook on our shelf. Now, except for his walks with the dog, and his regular morning hike up the mountain, we hardly ever saw our neighbor, and we thought about him even less. Him or his wife.

Sometime later it occurred to us that months had passed since either my sister or I had laid eyes on Mrs. Armitage, which led to our conclusion that they might be getting a divorce. That was one story we felt no need to investigate further.